Catherine Elizabeth Newman is an English journalist and presenter of Channel 4 News. Newman began her career as a newspaper journalist, and had spells at Media Week, The Independent, the Financial Times and The Washington Post. She has worked on Channel 4 News since 2006, initially as a correspondent and, since 2011, as a presenter. In 2018 she released Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention, a book detailing the lives of women in Britain in the 20th and 21st century.
Early life
Born in Guildford, Newman is the younger daughter of David Newman and his wife Julia Worsdall, both chemistry teachers, and has one sister. She attended a fee-paying girls school in Guildford until the age of 16, when she joined Charterhouse, where her father taught, as one of a few girls admitted to the school's sixth form. She has said that she stayed silent for years about the sexual harassment and other humiliation she experienced from fellow pupils. She was on the path to a career as a violinist or in the legal profession before changing her plans as a result of seeing BBC journalist Kate Adie on television. Newman read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she graduated with first-class honours.
Career
Early career
After university, Newman briefly worked on The Guardian Books section, then at Media Week and The Independent before joining the Financial Times at the age of 23. Her older colleague Alice Rawsthorn acted as a mentor at the FT, where Newman worked as a media and then political correspondent. While Newman was working at the FT, David Yelland, the editor of The Sun, offered her a slot called "Better than Lex". She seriously considered the offer, but later declined; the experience led to further opportunities in political journalism. Newman began a television career in 2000. She gained a Laurence Stern fellowship to work at The Washington Post for four months. During her period in the US, she followed the 2000 Presidential campaign of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
''Channel 4 News''
She joined Channel 4 News in January 2006 as a political correspondent and deputy to political editor Gary Gibbon. In this role she broke several stories, including claims the Treasury pushed through the nomination of then Chancellor Gordon Brown's close friend Ronald Cohen for the House of Lords, challenging Peter Mandelson at the Brighton Labour Party conference in 2009, over his claimed use of the "c" word in a conversation with Rebekah Brooks. Alongside this, she has also headed the team behind the FactCheck blog. From 2013 to 2015, Newman's pursuit of a story about the allegations of improper conduct levelled at Lord Rennard, once a leading figure in the Liberal Democrats, included her participation in an LBC local London radio phone-in on 27 February 2013 to quiz deputy Prime MinisterNick Clegg on the issue. Newman has commented that sexism was endemic at Westminster during her period as a lobby correspondent there, but has also said that the newspaper industry is even worse. She told Natasha Lunn in an interview for Red magazine in 2016: "As a woman in the media I feel a duty to make sure we report those issues. I’ve always wanted to right injustices; I suppose what’s changed is I’ve now got a keener sense of how journalists can hold power to account". The victim of online sexism for her work, Newman gave her support for "public humiliation" of trolls in 2013: "the best way to tackle these people is to publicly humiliate them". A regular commentator on politics in other media outlets, Newman has appeared as a guest panelist on Have I Got News for You and blogs for The Daily Telegraph and Economia magazine. Newman was long-listed for the Orwell Prize in 2010 and again in 2011 for the blog prize. She was announced as one of the judges for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2015. In February 2015, Newman tweeted that she was "ushered onto the street" for being female when she went to South London Islamic Centre for a 'Visit My Mosque' programme. The mosque started receiving violent threats from the public as the story spread. A spokesperson for the Hyderi Islamic Centre had said Newman had simply visited the wrong address, and CCTV footage showed Newman had left the building on her own accord. Newman and Channel 4 News editorBen de Pear later apologised, acknowledging that Newman had mistakenly visited the wrong building. In January 2018, Newman interviewed the Canadian psychologist and professor of psychology Jordan Peterson, who is known for his criticism of political correctness. The combative interview covered topics such as gender equality, including the gender pay gap, freedom of speech, and transgender rights. The interview became a viral phenomenon on YouTube, where many commenters were critical of Newman, several of them saying she had a preconceived and misplaced grasp of Peterson's views. The New York Times columnist David Brooks said that Newman had "distorted, simplified and restated Peterson's views to make them appear offensive and cartoonish". Writing for The Guardian, Nosheen Iqbal stated that Peterson had made "broad generalisations on male and female behaviour" and that he denied the existence of the gender pay gap "as a qualitative fact". Channel 4 News editor Ben de Pear said that the station had called in security specialists in response to social-media abuse and threats directed against her. Newman later shared that the abuse ranged from "cunt, bitch, dumb blonde" to "I’m going to find out where you live and execute you." Peterson had told his followers to "back off" of Newman, but later denied that there was any evidence of threats, and stated that the idea that the abuse was driven by misogyny was "ridiculous". Following the interview, Newman observed that her Wikipedia page had "been rapidly edited back and forth", and that women generally are misrepresented in their Wikipedia biographies because the "internet is being written by men with an agenda." Her book, Bloody Brilliant Women, concerning significant, but unheralded, 20th-century women, was published in 2018. The book presents case studies of both prominent and lesser known women throughout British history, finding parallels between their experiences and those of contemporary women.
In early 2020, Newman was announced by forthcoming radio station Times Radio as the presenter of their Friday drive time programme. She continues to present Channel 4 News whilst being a Times Radio presenter.
Personal life
Newman married writer John O'Connell, whom she met at university, in 2001. The couple have two daughters and live in London. Newman has written about having a miscarriage, and about deciding to abort another child, after discovering 13 weeks into her pregnancy that the baby had a very rare condition which meant there was a high chance that it would die.
